


make a little birdhouse in your soul

by psocoptera



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, Samwell Frogs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-05
Updated: 2016-02-05
Packaged: 2018-05-18 07:06:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5903632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psocoptera/pseuds/psocoptera
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bitty isn't alone, for Hazeapalooza, for his concussion, for any of it.  His daemon is there too.</p>
            </blockquote>





	make a little birdhouse in your soul

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a speed writing exercise. Please picture someone with a snail daemon, asking it if it wouldn't like to _try_ to be a dragonfly. No speed was exercised, but I had fun coming up with everyone's daemons anyways.
> 
> This is gen, but has canon-typical content re: Bitty's crush on Jack. Also a brief Parse appearance at the epikegster.

_Hazeapalooza '13_

Bitty knows something like this is coming - the older boys had dropped enough hints about not planning any hot dates for Saturday night - but he still panics when he steps out of the third floor bathroom, Siscua suddenly flutters away from his shoulder, and a black sack drops over his eyes.

"It's okay," Siscua coos, right away. "Just Shitty and Fan."

"Muahaha," Shitty says, "Your worst nightmare!" He gives Bitty a reassuring pat on the shoulder, though, before taking him by the upper arm and starting to guide him down the hall, the wrong way, towards the stairs instead of back to his room. Siscua lands back on his far side from Shitty, where he can feel her little beak poking and tugging at the sack, and then hops off again.

"Don't peck _me_ ," Fan says in his screechy voice, "We had to do it too, and Shitty made enough fuss over not leaving you in anyone else's hands."

"Birdbrains gotta stick together," Shitty says. "Bits?"

"I'm okay," Bitty says, a little waveringly, through the sack. Siscua clicks dubiously but settles onto his shoulder again.

"It's nothing gross," Fan says. "I don't know what you've heard about frat hazings, but nobody's going to touch you or separate you or anything like that."

"I would hope _not_ ," Siscua says, primly outraged.

"It's mostly just drinking," Fan goes on.

"Leave a little mystery," Shitty grumbles at Fan, but they've both always been talkers, explainers, answering questions Bitty didn't even know how to ask.

"Yes, he's a male peacock," Shitty had said, when he'd caught Bitty looking a little too long at Fan, when Bitty had met the team, when Shitty had descended on him, saying how glad they were to have another bird daemon around. "Did you know that most preverbal daemons change sex as often as they change form? It's literally the social pronoun conventions, the opposition assumption, that pin daemons down to a gender."

"Uh," Bitty had said. "So your parents didn't..."

"Oh, no," Shitty had said, winking. "We've just never been good listeners. My dad's whole family is always badgers and stoats, occasionally moles, they can't handle any bit of this gorgeous gentleman."

"Fan," Fan had said, arching his shining blue neck.

"Oh," Bitty had said. "Fan, like..." He gestured with his hands, spreading out his fingers, although Fan's tail feathers were down at the time. Fan had screeched, alarmingly, in a way that Bitty would find out later was his laugh.

"Nope," Shitty had said. "I'm Shitty, and he's Fan-fucking-tastic." Bitty still hadn't heard the story there, yet, or found out either of their original names, but there was time, he thought. Lots of long road trips once the season got going.

Maybe stumbling out of his dorm with a sack over his head is an odd time to feel optimistic, but he does; in the privacy of the sack, where even Siscua can't see his face, he can admit to himself that he's happy to get hazed if it will help him fit in with the team. Occasional brief panic aside, he doesn't really think anyone has it out for him, and the daemons have been nice about letting Siscua join their huddle at the end of the bench, but he's still not quite clicking, somehow.

"Is Jack going to be there, tonight?" he asks through the sack, and Shitty says "no questions!", but Fan is already answering.

"They were supposed to help us kidnap you, but Jack got worried about people seeing Claude standing outside your dorm, so they're going to meet us in - "

"A secret place!" Shitty cuts in, and then grunts and staggers next to Bitty in a way Bitty remembers from having a large bird land on your head. He's pretty glad Siscua ended up so small.

*

_Meeting the team_

The first time Bitty had met his new captain, he had assumed he had a pocket daemon. A mouse, or a beetle, or something; it was only natural, when you didn't see someone's daemon, to assume it was on their person somewhere. A tiny bat clinging to a polo collar, a stripy little bracelet snake, that sort of thing; it was sort of funny, to imagine the looming captain with some cute little daemon, but it went that way, sometimes.

He had literally screamed when they'd come out of Faber, after the first skate, and Claude had come galumphing around the corner right at them. Ransom and Holster had cackled, high-fiving, and it had taken Bitty two deep breaths, while the pounding of his heart slowed down, to realize that the enormous bull moose now bending down to lip at Jack's hair was Jack's daemon.

"Whoa," Ollie said, climbing down from Wicks - Bitty had felt secretly pleased he wasn't the only one who'd been startled - "How is that even possible?"

"Large daemons are a traditional sign of royalty!" Shitty had said brightly, behind them. "Just think of Henry VIII, marrying women with larger and larger daemons?"

Ollie, Bitty had thought, had probably not been referring not to Claude's size, unusual though it was, but to the fact that Jack's daemon had apparently been out of sight and range from him through the whole practice. He would realize as he spent more time with the team that Shitty was fiercely protective of that fact about Jack - it wasn't that it was a secret, exactly, it couldn't be, but even think about mentioning it and you'd have Shitty in your face, loud and derailing onto some other topic. It had taken Bitty what was maybe an embarrassingly long amount of time, and a chance link to an article about modern shamans, to make the connection to Jack's OD. And then, of course, there was no good way to ask "so I guess you got close enough to death for your bond to stretch". Claude seemed happy enough to wait outside academic buildings and dining halls, and to ride in a horse trailer behind the bus on road trips, and Bitty got used to bringing a piece of whatever he baked in the Haus kitchen out to Jack, sitting on the porch with his laptop and Claude's giant head coming over the railing.

*

_Lardo_

"Lardo!" Shitty yells, and, oh, _this_ is Lardo? She's not at all what Bitty had pictured, starting with being, apparently, a girl. She squirms out of Shitty's armpit to hug Jack, and Bitty, not seeing a daemon, peeks out the window to see if maybe he's been left outside with Claude. Maybe she's got an elephant and he'd wanted to go to Kenya to see real elephants, who even knows. Siscua flutters onto his shoulder, peering out too.

"Here, hello, hello, hi," someone says, too close, and they turn. There's a bee hovering about six inches from Siscua's beak. "Bee careful!" it (he?) says, as Bitty jerks back - the instinctive response to both a sudden insect in the face and someone else's daemon in proximity.

"Beehave," Lardo says, rolling her eyes, and the bee lands on her forehead and stares at Bitty like a black and yellow third eye while they shake hands.

Ny turns out to be as talkative as Lardo is quiet, and really likes buzzing around the kitchen, landing in Bitty's bowls of cut fruit or mixed fillings, while Bitty bakes.

"The paradox of the daemon is that I am not actually a bee," Ny says, from a bowl of cut apples. "A bee would be looking for nectar to bring back to her hive. A bee would dance to tell her sisters where she had found what she was looking for. A single bee is hardly even an animal; the hive is the organism."

"Could you have been a hive?" Siscua asks curiously. Bitty glares at her - _manners_ , please - but Ny doesn't dive at her, so she probably doesn't mind.

("'She' is closer than 'he'," Ny had corrected Bitty, when he had assumed. "Although if bees had pronouns I'm sure they wouldn't use the same one for queens and workers, and I'm definitely not a 'she' in the queen sense.")

"We tried," Ny buzzes. "But we could never manage it. But aren't all daemons, really, about thwarted instincts? You can't feed your young your crop milk any more than I can make wax or build honeycomb or be part of a greater whole, and yet, at some level, that's who we wish we could be, we've chosen these forms because those desires feel right to us."

Bitty blinks, not sure how to respond to that. Siscua hadn't written a manifesto when she settled, or anything; she'd just said, one day, "I guess this is me," and it had seemed about right - a sparrow-sized greyish-tan bird, more of a walker than a flyer.

"She mostly shuts up while I'm working," Lardo says, flicking Ny away from the bowl and stealing a chunk of apple for herself. "Bee in the bonnet."

"I'm the bee's knees," Ny says, but flies up to circle around the ceiling.

"Did you look up what kind of bird my daemon is?" Bitty asks Lardo. "Mostly only birders recognize her." He doesn't mind, he's just a little surprised to have pigeon milk come up in conversation.

"I like knowing things," Lardo says.

" _Columbina passerina_ ," Ny sing-songs, in time with the loop she's flying. "ColumBEEna passerEENa."

"Gonna let Fan eat you," Lardo mutters.

*

_Tadpole tour '14_

"You're really a goalie?" the redhead says skeptically. "You just seem kind of... not... stationary."

Bitty doesn't mean to eavesdrop on his touring tadpoles, except for how he totally is. The redhead does have a point - the guy in the Niemi sweatshirt must have walked twice as far as anyone else in the tour group, darting back and forth across the path to look at things, and his ferret, poinging around the group madly, seems about as different from Johnson's placid goldfish as a daemon could be.

("We are all in a fishbowl," Johnson had told Bitty once. "Meta's just more in tune with it.")

"My daemon was almost a shark!" the tadpole goalie says, answering. "Because they have to keep moving to breathe, you know? Plus, shark. My moms were looking into moving us to a houseboat when de settled ferret instead. Which is so much easier for games."

Bitty tries to picture a giant shark tank behind the glass behind the net where Johnson likes to leave Meta's bowl; it's quite an image.

"Your daemon's name is Dee?" the redhead asks.

"Der name is Tekaresk, de is a pronoun!" the other tadpole says, rapidly. "De, dem, der, the daemon pronouns, you've never heard that before? Samwell's supposed to be a really good place for, like, fluidity."

"But if your daemon is settled, it's got to be one or the other," the redhead says.

"Gonna catch dem and lift der tail to check?" a third tadpole says, sauntering up to the conversation, bullfrog on his shoulder. "Bet you'd love it if someone did that to your chipmunk."

"She's a _ground squirrel_ ," the redhead says, drawing himself up, squirrel chattering angrily.

The frog blinks at him and croaks. "Chill. Chill." The squirrel bristles.

"Okay!" Bitty says loudly. "So, uh - the tour _was_ over, but I forgot the, uh, bonus river walk! Optional! But if you'd like to follow me..."

"If they all come to Samwell, Claude's going to end up stepping on someone," Siscua whispers in his ear. Bitty thinks she means the daemons, not the tadpoles. Claude is, in fact, much easier-going than Jack, or at least, he doesn't dump Fan out of his antlers nearly as often as Jack dumps Shitty out of his lap, but Bitty's seen him pin other team daemons under his hoof when the wrestling and chasing gets too wild.

"They'll sort it out," Bitty whispers back. If they were alone, he would tease her about wanting Claude's attention herself - she's obsessed with the idea of roosting in his antlers like Fan does - but Bitty isn't going to mention that where he might get overheard. There's already enough gossip about Jack on campus, the last thing he needs is a rumor that his teammate is weird about him. And he's _not_ , that's all Siscua, but the gossip mill won't make that distinction.

*

_Post-playoffs '14_

"You should come back to the Haus with us," Ransom says at dinner. "No, look, we know you can't party right now, but we thought we'd do, like, a quiet night, play some poker, yeah?"

"A quiet night," Siscua says skeptically.

"They're hoping Shitty will let them play board games," Yetta says, yawning scornfully.

"I can't believe you'd rat me out, you rat," Ransom says. Yetta, in truth, does look a lot like an oversized rat, but most daemons are touchy about being said to look like anything other than what they are, so it seems like a risky thing to say to your roommate and defense partner's opossum. Bitty can't really say he understands the relationship between Holster and Ransom and their daemons, though. Yetta and Mmiri are the only nocturnal daemons on the team, and have always seemed to have a special bond based on their desire to be asleep during morning practices.

Bitty realizes he still hasn't answered Ransom. Ugh, he hates being concussed, he constantly feels like he's losing track of things.

"I'm in no shape to play poker for money," Bitty says. "But I suppose I could hang out a bit."

"Brah," Holster says approvingly, and Yetta high-fives Mmiri. Bitty's not sure who has weirder hands, the opossum's splayed pink fingers or the tarsier's long knobbly ones. None of Siscua and Fan and Ny and Claude have hands. Ugh, he's spacing out again.

He ends up wrapped in a blanket on an old reclining lawn chair in the Haus backyard, Siscua preening his hair like she's been doing non-stop since he got hit, listening quietly while Shitty and Lardo pass a joint and try to convince Jack he should try riding Claude. He can hear shouting from inside the Haus; so much for poker being a quiet game.

"I have ridden him," Jack finally says. "He's not comfortable."

"That's what he's for though, right?" Ny says, from somewhere on Lardo. "Not riding. Being not-comfortable?"

Jack is quiet for a long time, tucked up against Claude's side.

"Maybe," he admits. "Something... like that."

Claude whuffles.

"My dad thought it was teen rebellion, and my mom thought I wanted an excuse to not ride the bus with the rest of the team, but..." Jack sighs. "I'm not easy. I know that. So."

"Speaking of rebellion," Shitty says, easily, "I was just reading, did you know, those horrible 'work-ready daemon' initiatives actually work? Like, they do get more hamsters and rats and prairie dogs out of those classes? _But_ , side effect, the rate of really inconvenient daemons also goes up, like, porcupines, sea anemones, camels, all kinds of rare stuff. One kid in this article settled a walrus, can you imagine that conversation? You're the coach trying to convince these kids they wanna get in the corporate wheel or the cage or the cubicle or whatever and now Bobby's bringing home a fucking walrus, oops."

"Everyone was always so happy when Claude was a wolverine like my dad's," Jack says.

"My mom was always like, how about a cricket, that's an insect," Lardo says. "Um, not the same?"

Coach's football teams had always mostly been dogs, like him; Bitty thinks he remembers Ransom saying something about his family mostly having reptiles, classic doctor daemons, turtles and snakes and stuff. Family traits are weird, and, like, friend groups. Bitty gets vlog comments sometimes from other people with common ground doves. About half of them make the "something in _common_ " pun.

"I think Bittle is asleep," Jack says.

"Mnot," Bitty mumbles, but Jack insists on walking him back to his dorm anyways, Claude's big shaggy inconvenient bulk following patiently behind.

*

_Epikegster '14_

Siscua almost flies to Jack, the night that Kent Parson's green-eyed tabby cat glares at them over Parson's shoulder as he walks away. Claude isn't there, of course, upstairs in the Haus, and Bitty feels Siscua flutter on his shoulder and knows what she's thinking, where that almost-hop was almost going.

Jack slams his door, and Bitty hears a bellow from outside. He looks out the window. Claude has his antlers lowered and is grunting at Parson, low, resonant sounds that rattle the window. Bitty's gotten used to Claude, since that first encounter, but he's reminded all over again that Claude is a Very Large Animal. The front lawn is a crazy mess of people and daemons but they're all giving Claude a wide berth.

Parson says something to Claude, Bitty can't tell what, and Claude hangs his head. On an impulse, Bitty opens the window.

"Go," he says to Siscua, and she gets it, and darts out. Bitty doesn't like having the plane of the wall between them, but after a year of Samwell hockey, their separation is strong even into the farthest corner of the ice from the bench; he can handle this as long as he can still see her, or she can see him.

Siscua flaps down and lands on Claude's head. Bitty has no idea what they're saying, but he watches out the window for awhile, as Parson drives away, as Siscua shifts from Claude's head to the hump on his shoulders, and back to his antlers. She's agitated, or upset, worried maybe, angry, it's hard to say exactly.

Bitty wonders if Jack is looking out his window at Claude too. He can't imagine not being with his daemon, after something like that. But there's a roiling epikegster between them, and it's just as impossible to imagine Jack shoving his way through it as it is to imagine Claude.

He's not sure how much time has passed when Siscua flies back up to the window.

"What a mess," she says, snuggling into Bitty's neck. Bitty is the kind of respectful where he's also ragingly curious but knows it's none of his business, so he goes and vlogs rather than pester her with questions.

"I don't think he'd mind me telling you," Siscua says, after, while he's changing for bed. "Claude's... it's hard for him, part of what he's _for_ is weeding out teams that don't really want Jack, enough to deal with the complications, but it's still hard, knowing he puts Jack in a tighter spot. They don't want the Aces, but if Parson's right that the Aces are still set up with all the logistical groundwork they did when they thought they were drafting them, they have to at least think about it."

"If the Aces can do it, the Falconers can do it," Bitty says, hoping that's true. He's so lucky, with Siscua. Maybe that's not a good way to think about your daemon. But that she's small, not flashy... _female_... there's a lot about Bitty to give him away, to not quite fit in, from the figure skating and baking to less-definable things. He's glad his daemon isn't one of them, that he can walk down the street without drawing attention, fly home to Georgia without special accommodations, wait to come out to his parents until he feels ready. Not that people weren't sometimes straight with same-sex daemons, like he'd always assumed about Jack... 

If Jack was his, Bitty thinks sleepily, they would sleep on the ground floor, with the window always open by the bed, so Claude could stick his head into the room and reach Jack. Or, no, they would remodel, double-wide doorways, soaring ceilings, open floor plan, so Claude could come right in...

*

_Frozen Four '15_

Jack is alone when Bitty finds him. Bitty wants to yell at him sometimes, that just because he and Claude _can_ separate it doesn't mean they _have_ to, that he shouldn't have to be alone so much just because one time he died a little. Claude had been watching from the zamboni entrance, like always, when they left the ice... and that's what sends Bitty to the loading docks, the thought that Jack will be there at Claude's trailer...

But he's not. He's alone. And it breaks Bitty's heart.

Siscua coos mournfully, and Bitty has his arms around Jack almost before he can think about it, half-expecting Jack to flinch. He's still, though, under Bitty's arms.

There's a flutter like a drawn breath, and Siscua settles onto Jack's other shoulder, onto the hard armor of his shoulder pad. They're not touching - he might not even be able to feel her weight through the pad, she doesn't weigh more than a double tablespoon of butter - but it's the closest she's ever been to another person, and Bitty can feel it, electric, through all the grief and bitterness.

When Claude finally comes to join them, nosing at Jack's hair, he's so close to Bitty that Bitty can feel the steam and snort of his breath on the side of his neck.

There's a moment when their stillness feels fragile again, like the slightest twitch would make everyone have to leap apart from each other. But nobody moves, and slowly, it relaxes, until everything before is gone, and the closeness of the four of them is a new but settled thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the They Might Be Giants song "Birdhouse In Your Soul", which I had quite forgotten also has a line about a bee in your bonnet, until I listened to it again just now while titling this.
> 
> Ny is named for Nyuki from my favorite bee graphic novel _Clan Apis_. I believe nyuki is Swahili for bee.
> 
> I could talk all day about daemons and gender and sexuality and what if the whole "your daemon is the opposite sex" thing was a pseudoscientific idea of an earlier era. I feel pretty strongly that in a world with cis and trans and fluid and agender people you'd have cis and trans and fluid and agender daemons, not necessarily matching their person's gender in any particular way, and why would shapeshifting beings even have to have gender anyways, and none of this would line up with any particular sexuality in exactly the way real gender doesn't. On the other hand, this whole thing started when I misread "peacoat bisexual" as "peacock bisexual", so Shitty at least totally has a male daemon of non-straightness there.


End file.
